Nottingham Braid

The early history of the Nottingham Braid
Company is not fully known to me.

In 1965 a legacy enabled Martin Cecil Tubbs to buy
the Nottingham Braid Co. and form at least the fifth generation of textile
entrepreneurs in the Tubbs family. The postal address was Aberdeen Street in
Nottingham and it stood at its junction with Handel Street, Sneinton, the major
road which had recently ceased to be part of the route taken by the trams,
later trolley buses to Carlton, though the poles remained for a while.

The business is said to have been founded around
the time of the Great War by interests connected with Attenboroughs of Beeston
and Long Eaton, a family with a longstanding connection with braid and
trimmings manufacture, represented in my generation by Courtney Attenborough of
Supertrim.

The chief name at NBC in 1965 was a Mrs
Topham (probably a member of the Attenborough tribe), whom I never met. The
fortunes of the firm were at a low ebb and Mrs T was lucky to get anything for
the business and its ancient braiding machines. I don’t suppose it was much but
don’t know the sum. MCT also bought the building, presumably at its normal
commercial value.

Ignore this paragraph and the next if you
know anything about textiles. There are a number of different ways of forming
fabrics. MCT constantly propounded his theory that braiding was the earliest
textile technology, beginning with the plaiting of ladies’ hair. In flat braid
with an odd number of ends the direction of the yarn varies with each repeat,
left to right (S), right to left (Z). In circular braiding with an even number
of ends half the ends go in one direction and the other half …… and you can
have a core up the middle … In braiding the overall direction is always
longitudinal. The machines are often referred to as maypole braiders as the
motion is identical.

In
weaving the warp is also longitudinal but the woof (as it was always known at
Tubbs Lewis) or weft traverses horizontally. In knitting a warp is optional but
the fabric is formed by interlacing loops. Cord is formed by the twisting
together of longitudinal fibres and held together by reverse tension (twist) in
the individual strands. Bobbin lace is an elaborate form of braiding. Lace net
is more or less a hybrid of most of the above, where warp sort of becomes weft
every now and then. Here endeth the lesson.

Educated readers should resume here. Though
I am no more than a beginner in any form of textile manufacture I have done a
bit and therefore hate it when people trample on the English Language and talk
of woven braid and similar oxymorons. Am I the only one left in step?

The office senior was a Mr Rudd, then
approaching 80. Mr Rudd used to walk alone with his patchwork shopping bag to
the branch of Barclays at the bottom of Hockley, (later a florist’s
sundriesman, now a pub yippee!) to fetch the wages which in those days were
always paid in cash to the weekly paid; this journey was rightly considered to
be dangerous. The main privilege of joining the salaried staff in those days
was that you had to wait an extra fortnight or three weeks before you got paid,
had to open a bank account and probably got less money than the weekly hands
were taking home. One of the first changes was to transfer the bank account to
the nearby Midland on Bath Street, whose manager was about 6’ 7” tall, though
by no means as intimidating as HH (Bert) Cooke who was the formidable manager
at Barclays St Peter’s Street, whither the account was later transferred.

The Braid’s most prominent neighbours were:
the Salvation Army whose large hostel adjoined NBC and provided an endless
stream of unfortunates who accidentally fell into the cellars and occasionally
succumbed to the temptation to enter the NBC premises and parked cars more
feloniously: AW Lymn, the funeral merchants who of course still exist and trade
from those premises, amongst others passim. In those days Lymn made their own elm
coffins in the workshops on Aberdeen Street and the Braid benefited from an
endless supply of offcuts to burn in its ancient boiler, probably a Robin Hood
from Beeston: A police station which was reluctant to deal with problems on
Aberdeen Street because it was in a different Division. Joined-up thin.. blue
line – and they still play the same silly game the dumbclucks: Victoria Wine.
It is hard to believe these days when the world is awash with give-away
take-home drinks’ outlets that Victoria Wine, just a little lock-up shop,
attracted huge queues of Christmas shoppers when the brewers’ stranglehold on
the off-sales market was first breached by a new wave of retailers.

The
Bible
Class
became the firm’s extra-mural office. All the pubs in Sneinton had
long-established nicknames, The Lamp,
The King Billy, The Market Side and so on, a custom I have never seen so
consistently applied anywhere else.
The
Bible Class
, properly the Bath Inn
on the corner of Bath Street and Handel Street, of course was a nod to the
Sally Ann and was owned by Shipstone’s brewery, itself lamented though a
credible version of the beer is now produced. Some of these have been re-named
with their nicknames. The most famous of these pubs was The Pretty Windows, properly the Fox and Grapes, which featured large in the officially unsolved
murder of its landlord. Everybody in Nottingham except me and the Police knows whodunit
but nobody will ever say. There was a cold case review of the 1963 murder 50
years after the event but no arrest.

Peter Hiatt became a Director of Nottingham
Braid and I think he owned one share. The ground floor housed the canteen, a
ghastly cavern smelling of Swarfega and gas, some manufacturing and the single
office. MCT had the front vestibule converted to his office, so the doors which
appear in the painting are anachronous. One very sad task was to unclutter the
office of fifty years’ worth of ledgers and other record and pattern books. These
were offered to the City Museum which foolishly rejected them and the books
were duly pulped by Trent Waste.

New blood soon arrived in the form of Jean
Johnson who had previously worked for Jaeger in Hucknall. MCT also employed
several braiders (Geoff Matthews was one) who originated in Leek but none of
them stayed very long. They have to be a bit odd to survive Leek and don’t thrive
in exotic climes. The middle floor is depicted in my shaky picture. I apologise
for its quality but it is one of few surviving photograph ever taken
inside the factory. There are more at the bottom of the page.

Trade was roughly divided into three
sectors: The first was the local lace and hosiery trades, which must have been
the reason the business was set up in the first place. Trimmings aplenty were
required to adorn bridal wear and the like. Another trade supplied was button
manufacture and there was a steady outlet for pseudo tartan patterns for export
Scotch Whisky packaging and even a pattern for the Vimto manufacturer. The Lace
Market in Nottingham was primarily warehousing and finishing. The lace machines
were more likely to be found in Beeston or Long Eaton, but Albert Smith was
certainly running lace machines in the Lace Market in the seventies. The only
textile machine I have ever seen that was more impressive than a Leavers lace
machine running is a massive circular sacking loom spotted at ITMA in Hanover. You
can see one at the Wollaton Hall Industrial Museum in Nottingham but it doesn’t
work, though it should be restored to use. While there you may also admire a
magnificent, complex lace braider built by Attenboroughs. AC Gill were
manufacturing bridal ware. George Wigley were supplying cotton a gogo and few
would have predicted then that the Lace Market would now be a pedestrianized,
gentrified quartier of apartments and cafes, sans totties probably.

The Empire wholesale trade which was fairly
rigid with similar orders arriving regularly from Australia for large
quantities of ric-rac, lacet, soutache, duplex, and insertion braids (Oxford
comma) in a wide but gradually shrinking range of rayon Duracol colours
supplied by Courtaulds, which finally shrank to nothing, rapidly losing Nigger
Brown, Natal Brown, African Brown et al, which one used to know by their
catalogue numbers but I have forgotten all of them. Don’t blame me, I didn’t
name them. Pink 63, Black 11 and so on: The home market was rather more driven
by fashion in the age of Carnaby Street and Mary Quant, and there were endless
requests for novelty from the fashion conscious wholesalers who were divided
between Fitzrovia (Kersen on Cleveland Street being the most prominent and
trendy), several on Charlotte Street, and the East End – Brick Lane, Spitalfields
and the Mile End and Bethnal Green Roads. These were mostly Jewish firms
supplying Jewish rag trade outfits, Suskin, E Hecht, H Bestimmt, H Fabian and
Ralph Swimer. They also supplied retail haberdashery stores. What the Braid
made for a penny might retail for 12 or 15p in John Lewis. In those days nobody
supplied retailers direct. Completely taboo. In my youth every M&S store proudly
proclaimed that 90% of its products were British made. Well they aren’t now. By
the end of the seventies most of that had been superseded by recent Bangladeshi
immigrants many specialising in leather garments, a remarkable and rapid transformation,
a replay of the earlier displacement of the Huguenots, though some of the
trimmings merchants survive, including Fabian and Ralph Swimer.. Spitalfields
is now so upmarket that few of us can afford to walk its golden pavements. One
consequence of the step change in fashion demands was the requirement to get
orders rapidly delivered to London. The Railways were at their nadir, deprived
of adequate investment and raped by Richard Beeching. In an often-repeated
story, MCT was advised by one of his mitteleuropaischer associates to use
Blackguards, which turned out to be Placketts, who ran next-day delivery +
collection services from Nottingham to London and elsewhere, fuelled by the midlands
textile industry, but they did not cover the whole country. Their rates for
Liverpool were double those for London, because of the need for a banksman at
all times. How we laughed!

There was the purchase of a knitting
machine to make silk ties. This worked very well but the fashion for knitted
ties did not last. One remarkable piece of lateral thinking was the tow-rope.
This was loosely braided with thick polypropylene and the fused end of the rope
could be looped back and inserted into the opened braid structure which would close
fast under tension without needing a knot. This idea must have originated
before NBC days, as I can’t picture any machine at Nottingham man enough to
make such a braid. Soft towing is officially discouraged, probably even illegal
these days and there was no commercial take-up of this brilliant idea, which
works, however dangerously. Another was the manufacture of chenille, a form of
cut-pile cable. Practically the only sixties survivors of my oh so trendy
wardrobe are a couple of NBC ties and a purple Betty Van Gelder chenille tie.
Must be worth a few bob. One triumph was ogee braid, a novel variant of ric-rac
which depends on different tension on various bobbins. By far the most
successful and important change was the conversion of all the braider spindles
to carry a much heavier package on an enlarged, moulded bobbin that could be
wound on a modern automatic multi-spindle winder. The picture shows the original
small bobbins. Accurate winding is critical to braiding as it is only
cost-effective to change all the bobbins at once. There was a running battle
with the ‘Elf contingent. All the
overhead shafting and belting was gradually boxed in. Modern braiders each have
individual electric motor but the traditional drive was via bevels from central
shafts, boxed in in my picture but the overhead belt is still open. A request
to cover braiders with a plastic dome was booed off the pitch by the entire
industry. Braiders do have an effective stop mechanism, and accidents were more
potential than actual, fortunately. Another problem was noise, easily dealt
with by the use of protective gear, but before that time generations of
braiding operators were driven to an early world of impaired hearing, along
with many fellow workers in other branches of the textile industry.

MCT occasionally received letters addressed
to Dear Mr Lewis, a senescent nod from folk recognising the family connection
to Tubbs Lewis - though Joe Lewis died in 1890. A universal howler was typed letters
addressed to the Nottingham Briad Company.

Sometime around 1967 MCT also bought H
Jepson and Co from Peter White, then based in Sandown Road, Ascot Drive Derby.
For a while both establishments were maintained. There was a deal to sell the
NBC premises to the Salvation Army, for about £7,000 I believe, but it wasn’t
long before the whole of the site was purchased by the City. I suspect the
Salvation Army had their nose closer to the wind. Nothing came of whatever plans
it said it had and the Braid has been a car park for many years, much like the
rest of Nottingham. I think the painting understates the larger bulk of the
Army’s portion and perhaps falsely depicts them as distinct edifices. The
Sandown Road premises were rented from White until the firm moved to Gresham
Road, Derby around 1980